Interpretive Resource

Claude Monet first traveled to London in 1870, to escape from the Franco-Prussian War that was devastating Paris at that time. He does not seem to have done much painting on that trip, but he did visit the city’s museums. The atmospheric marine scenes of Joseph Mallord William Turner particularly fascinated him.

Monet went back to London with the intention of painting in the fall of 1899. His seventh-floor suite at the Savoy Hotel had a view of the Thames River, with Waterloo Bridge and the factories of Southwark visible to the east, and Charing Cross Railway Bridge and the Palace of Westminster to the west. He spent six weeks executing quick studies with the intention of finishing them in his Giverny studio. He returned to the Savoy in February 1900 (this time staying on the sixth floor), and again in 1901. This nearly obsessive sequence of campaigns resulted in the largest series that the artist painted away from Giverny.

London’s notorious fog captivated Monet, as is evident in Waterloo Bridge, London, Gray Weather. But the fog’s industrial causes—coal-burning factories, boats, and other vehicles—no longer directly interested him. Now he was an observer of atmospheric effect, not a participant in a scene, as he had been when painting Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare in 1877. Although smokestacks appear in the background of the Art Institute’s London view and traffic moves along the bridge, these features may as well be poplars or poppies; their purpose is to catch the light and lend variety to the composition, and they are unified by the pervasive blue-gray of the air.